Nanostructure and optical propertes of porous silicon layer

In this paper nanostructures Porous silicon layers have been prepared by electrochemical etching (ECE) technique of (111) P-type silicon wafer with a solution Electrolytic HF: ethanol at a concentration of 1:2 with various anodization currents and etching time of 20 min. The morphological, structural and optical properties of nanostructure porous silicon were investigated by Atomic Force Microscopy (AFM), X-Ray Diffraction (XRD) and Photoluminescence (PL) respectively. From AFM images, we found that the PS layer has sponge like structure, and average diameter of pore and thickness of PS layer increased with increasing of the anodization currents. X-ray diffraction show that the crystal size was reduced toward nanometric scale, and then a broadening of diffraction peaks (111) was observed. The band gap of the samples was measured through the photoluminescence (PL) peak.